The Unwanted Conti Bride (The Legendary Conti Brothers) by Tara Pammi Page A

match.”
    “Of course I do.”
    He nodded. “It’ll probably break her heart to see her daughter doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Her daughter can’t afford a romantic bone. Anyway, we steal all kinds of time during the day to see each other and get up to all kinds of...”
    He raised his brows and waggled them. Warmth tinted her cheeks, the brown of her eyes gleaming bronze. Oh, she wanted him, all right.
    “Afternoon sex—how delightfully imaginative, Sophia.”
    “I had to say something when she burst into my bedroom and demanded to know why I wasn’t with my beloved husband on my wedding night.”
    “Why do you live with your parents? Doesn’t that curb your nightly...activities?”
    “I don’t have any nightly...” She clamped her mouth tight, her face flushed. “I...work a lot of late nights and I like to keep track of what’s going on with Sal and the company... It’s just easier that way.”
    Again, a pang stole through Luca. Had he so thoroughly crushed her heart that she had no romantic notions left like any other woman?
    “I do regret not spending our wedding night with you. Did you wait for me to spirit you away?”
    She flushed and it lit a fire inside him. “You’re absolutely cuckoo. I can’t stay with my parents anymore. Not if I want to have some peace to work in the evenings.”
    “So move into Villa de Conti. Into my room. Alex and Leandro don’t stay here all the time. Neither will I distract you, except when I feel like it. But—”
    She hissed. The woman hissed at him. “Where were you? And why do you never answer a single call or a text?”
    Luca raised a brow. No one ever asked him where he went and when he came back. Not even Leandro, after he had reassured himself that Luca wasn’t going to self-destruct. The novelty of it was amusing and a little disconcerting.
    “Here and there,” he said, tucking her arm through his. “I can take society only in small doses.” Which was more truth than he’d ever confided in anyone. “After the drama in the conference room that day, I needed time to recoup.”
    “Time to recoup?” she repeated, but with more consideration and less belligerent disbelief this time. Like she was thinking far too much again.
    Dio , the woman really needed less thinking, worrying and planning and more ravishing in her life. A good thing he was so committed to it.
    “ Si. But now I’m ready to be your adoring husband.” He smiled then and brought her to the huge ballroom.
    He frowned as the music filtered through him.
    A string quartet was playing. There was dynamics, articulation, wonderful fluctuation to the tempo but no soul to the music, no risk-taking except perfectly executed sharps and flats.
    The lifelessness of it jarred through his head. A near compulsion ran in his veins to either yell for the music to stop or to stalk out of the room.
    “Luca?” Sophia prompted.
    Neither option was feasible, though.
    Pasting on his megawatt smile—the one that had once driven a tempestuous young woman to avow love to him in the midst of her own engagement party—Luca turned to her. “Yes, bella mia ?”
    Light brown eyes studied him like he was a fly under a microscope.
    Not the effect he intended in that perceptive face. Not even that endearing snort or roll of her eyes. “The music, you don’t like it?”
    Pure panic bolted through Luca for a second. As if every facade he had built over the years was being ripped away, leaving him utterly stripped of his armor. To face who he was, what he was capable of, in front of the whole world and see the horror he’d seen in his mother’s eyes. He couldn’t bear that look in Sophia’s eyes. “Do you know what is happening with Kairos and Tina?”
    “No,” she said with an arched look that told him she saw through the ploy. It was becoming harder to pretend with her. Like his mask was slowly but surely cracking, giving her glimpses of him. “We spoke briefly,